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An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a Microsoft patent application that reaches back to December 2009 and describes 'recording agents' to legally intercept VoIP phone calls. The 'Legal Intercept' patent application is one of Microsoft's more elaborate and detailed patent papers, which is comprehensive enough to make you think twice about the use of VoIP audio and video communications. The document provides Microsoft's idea about the nature, positioning and feature set of recording agents that silently record the communication between two or more parties."

I'm quite sure Microsoft has patents on all the above, but none are alarming enough to mention. This article is FUD. Absolutely no link has been drawn between the Skype product and this patent, except that Skype does voice transmissions and this patent is for a system that intercepts them.

Also, I believe Skype uses a peer-to-peer method for communicating between nodes, which would make it hard to apply this patent to Skype anyway. The peer-to-peer nature of Skype is why the last big outage took quite a while to resolve. They couldn't just "reboot their servers"; updated software had been deployed to the nodes (ie. you) and was malfunctioning.

There is a GNU implementation for ZRTP available, C++ and Java, which is used in the followingclient:- Twinkle (C++ SIP client, needs some know-how to build it)- Jitsi (former SIP Communicator), a Java based Client, available for Linux, Windows, Mac,
often "ready-to-go" installation packages availbel (some Linux, Windows, Mac). Active development.- CSipSimple - an Android clinet that supports ZRTP- some iPhone clients are currently under development AFAIK

and the development goes on (for example GNU ZRTP is available for the well known PJSIP/PJSUA library that manyprojects use to build clients.